There
are not many concepts within cultural theory today, which could claim
as much
importance as the concept of "cultural translation". A great deal of
its
popularity is actually based upon the belief that cultural translation
could help
us to pacify dangerous cultural conflicts or even prevent threatening
wars of
cultures. In fact, it tackles the phenomenon of cultural hybridization
and thus
opens the perspective of a new trans-national culture, which transcends
the
multiculturalist vision of the world as a cluster of different cultural
identities. The problem is, however, that this vision doesn't allow for
a new
type of trans-national political subject. It reduces the utopian
potentiality
of translation to a mere cultural horizon.

The
crucial question is, therefore, whether we can make use of an idea of
translation,
which doesn't simply take place between "different cultures", nor in
a "third space" of their cultural hybridization, but beyond the very
boundary
between cultural and social. More concretely, the question is, whether
the idea
of translation can provide a ground for a new type of social and
political
subjectification, which transcends the model of representative
democracy still
exclusively confined to the political framework of nation-state.

An
answer to this question, as we believe, should be searched for in
connection
with theories of the multitude, i.e. of new forms of social
subjectification,
which occur under the paradigm of post-fordist modes of production. It
can help
us to finally break the deadlock of culturalization/depoliticization,
to which
the concept of cultural translation has hitherto been doomed.